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Schools need to understand AI
Over the past few weeks I’ve talked to handful of high school students about how AI is being treated at their schools, and the results are largely disappointing (though somewhat understandable).
Ultimately, I have three main takeaways from the conversations.
Schools are scared of AI
The general thought from the schools is “No AI for anything, ever”. You can’t use it in any way, for any assignment, at any time. Of course, this is faulty logic, because bits of AI are baked into so much, and because the definition of “AI” is very loose.
As a small example, when you’re texting someone and your phone suggests the next word or suggests fixing a typo, that very much could be considered AI. If Google Docs underlines a word to help with spelling, did you just cheat and use AI?
I get what schools are going for here, but it’s much more gray than they think. That leads to…
Handwritten essays
Since detecting AI-written work is nearly impossible, schools are requiring students to write essays in class, by hand. That makes sense to me. While I don’t love writing long pieces of text by hand, this seems like a reasonable solution. Allowing any use of the computer in class or at home to write an essay would undoubtedly be used some some students to cheat by using generative AI like ChatGPT and this is the best way to avoid that.
